Subject: Re: [lojban] R. Seress's "Gloomy Sunday" etc.

From: Robin Turner <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 May 2002 14:31:08 +0300

On Sunday 05 May 2002 19:32, aolung wrote:
> I've made up some pages on Rezsö Seress and his notorious song,
> including a translation of one of his songs to Lojban.
>
> It's on: www.fa-kuan.muc.de/SERESS.RXML
>
> I also typed in an article of a Hungarian newspaper I got from a
> dear friend about ten years back, and translated it into English.
> To my great surprise, the translation's text is a good deal longer
> than the original's!! Up to now, It always was my firm opinion that
> with regard to conciseness, English was leading among other
> European languages (first of all thinking of German, French,
> Italian, Spanish, Dutch - but also Finnish etc.). Now that! I hope
> it doesn't just depend on my awkward English style ;-)
>
> Robin-the-Turk, how is that with Turkish (compared to Hungarian)?
> I imagine that also Mandarin, written in Pinyin, might be lenthy
> enough. Maybe Hebrew (even romanized/vocalized) might be
> pretty concise. What's your opinion?

As I said before, it depends whether you're talking about number of 
words, number of phonemes, number of characters or whatever. On a 
number-of-words count, Turkish comes over as incredibly concise, but 
of course some of those words are very long, the famous example being 

c~ekoslovakyalIlas~tIramadIklarImIzdanmIydInIz
Are you one of those whom we were unable to turn into a 
Czechoslovakian?
(tilde here equals sedilla on the previous letter)

Turkish's use of case makes it marginally more concise than languages 
which rely more on prepositions, and the lack of articles helps, e.g.

eve
to the house

I think there is also the factor that translation frequently results 
in something wordier than the original, irrespective of the languages 
involved. One reason is, as I think I mentioned earlier, that if 
something is obligatory in L1 and optional in L2 (e.g. tense) we tend 
to put it in the L2 translation. Another is that ideas that can be 
expressed concisely in L1 need a wordy explanation in L2, simply 
because they are more common in L1 culture. I can translate "kan 
davasI" literally as "blood-feud" but transling "namüs davasI" as 
"honour feud" doesn't work - I'd need a whole sentence to get the 
idea across.

robin.tr

-- 
"Bravo Epictetus!" - Epictetus

Robin Turner
IDMYO, Bilkent Universitesi
Ankara 06533
Turkey

http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin